Energy Management
Carbon as the new
currency In terms of environmental legislation, operational carbon – the CO2 produced in running a facility – is of paramount concern, especially as it can account for as much as 90% of whole life carbon emissions. In both the US and UK, nearly 40% of all energy is expended in buildings and other facilities, with similar percentages for carbon emissions. The steady growth in energy consumption and carbon emissions therefore poses a serious problem for balancing the carbon equation if measures to reduce energy demand do not succeed as expected.
The UK’s carbon footprint is over 600 million tonnes of CO2 annually, and operational carbon in real estate is a far greater concern than embedded carbon. As such, the scope to reduce carbon is huge, with pressure increasing on firms to cut energy demand and therefore reduce their carbon footprint. In order to achieve this goal, however, businesses will need to have greater control over how their facilities are operated and maintained, as well as the extent to which new and cleaner technology, including IT, is diffused into everyday routines.
At the moment, the primary driver for the design of new and refurbished real estate is low carbon or, more correctly, zero carbon. However, this objective brings with it the need to re-engineer design, delivery and operational processes. A complete re-thinking of processes will be essential here, not least for developing new methods and tools to guide real estate owners and designers towards solutions that satisfy countless criteria, of which energy efficiency is just one.
Assessing the energy efficiency of a design is now amongst a range of measures that are routinely applied
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to a new building or other facilities, and owners, as well as designers, are generally intent on achieving the highest rating. BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method) in the UK and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) in the US are the most widely used methods, and have therefore become accepted as the basis for measuring the environmental performance of a proposed design.
A derivative method is ‘BREEAM In- Use’ which, as the name suggests, is applied during the operational phase to help reduce operating costs and improve environmental performance. However, these methods have to be supported by techniques and tools to enable the design process, none of which will have much impact unless the process is fed with reliable information and data based on the performance of facilities in-use. Again, CAFM may have the answer here, as systems like these can provide this information and data in a form that senior management, designers and facilities managers can readily utilise in their respective roles.
Carbon as a business
tool For all of these reasons, carbon is increasingly becoming the new currency when it comes to deciding on what is built and what can be sustained into the future, and it has begun to drive yields. In fact, carbon is now already replacing long-held views of what it takes to make a scheme feasible. As a result, this focus on carbon is not only driving design, but it is also having a direct impact on construction and, to an even greater degree, on operations.
In order to benefit from these developments, however, it is vital for businesses to examine how their space is being used, by whom and for what purpose, and also to determine
if current utilisation will be adequate and appropriate for the future. This kind of information will be invaluable for pinpointing waste – especially in terms of energy – and for identifying non-value adding services and operations.
For senior managers, this level of insight is vital, since waste in any form adds unnecessarily to operating costs, erodes profit margins, and threatens futures. As such, anything that doesn’t add value to the business needs to be rooted-out and eliminated.
Armed with this information, it will be much easier for management to determine a strategy and policies for achieving carbon reduction through more efficient use of energy, including operational plans for active campaigns that are aimed at reducing energy consumption. However, in order to achieve the best results, personnel at all levels will need to be aware of the energy and carbon-related implications of their actions, good and bad, and will then need to use this information to shape their behaviour for the better.
Anyone who is engaged in formulating the strategy and policies related to corporate real estate and facilities needs to take account of these issues, as well as the changing landscape that modern businesses are facing. In particular, companies will need to plan for a future that includes environmental regulations that are likely to be even more restrictive and challenging than what exists today – and yet still retain the flexibility that they will need to match their agility in business with agility in services and smart infrastructure.
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